The discovery of novel enantioselective reactions to generate optically active compounds plays a fundamental role in pharmaceutical research and represents one of the most important developments in modern organic chemistry.1 Many organic compounds of interest as pharmaceuticals and pesticides are chiral and very often only one of the enantiomers is effective or desirable for biological purposes. With the growing demand for enantiomerically pure compounds, asymmetric catalysis has become increasingly more important because of its high efficiency.
Asymmetric catalysis takes advantage of chiral catalysts to generate chiral compounds. The area of transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric reactions has witnessed the development of numerous novel chiral ligands.2 Among the many chiral catalysts developed, the chiral ligands BINAP, QUINAP and BINOL have proven to be particularly effective in catalyzing asymmetric reactions (Scheme 1). A general feature of these ligands comprises the presence of a single chiral axis. Chiral N, P ligands comprise an important type of chirality transfer agent for asymmetric catalysis.3 

Palladium-catalyzed asymmetric allylic substitution reactions, by means of chiral ligands, remain of continued interest in the synthetic community large because of their synthetic potential.4 Recently, non-symmetric heterobidentate ligands have been found to be efficient chiral sources for asymmetric allylic substitution reactions. These ligands regulate the enantioselectivity through their steric and ligand effects. In particular, the coordination of ligand atoms of different rows of the periodic table affects the susceptibility of the π-allyl terminal to nucleophiles in a different way (trans-effect), resulting in a highly regioselective nucleophilic attack.5 Some successful examples of such bidentate ligands comprise the 2-(phosphinoaryl)oxazoline ligands4a-c (Scheme 2) and the (phosphinonaphthyl) isoquinoline (QUINAP) ligand.4d

While these ligands have been useful in a number of asymmetric reactions, there are still many more asymmetric transformations that can benefit from the discovery of new chiral ligands.
The present disclosure refers to a number of documents, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety.